Microsoft Corp.s Macintosh Business Unit (Mac BU) has disclosed details about the success of Office 2008 for Mac and released an update for the office suite.

The company says Office 2008 launched at Macworld Expo 2008, and sales for the productivity suite continue to grow, selling faster than any previous version of Office for Mac in the past 19 years.

The response has been amazing  since we launched in January, the velocity of sales for Office 2008 is nearly three times what we saw after the launch of Office 2004, said Craig Eisler, general manager of the Mac BU at Microsoft.

As we set our course for future versions, we are working closely with customers and will also expand our staff to to ensure that Office for Mac remains the powerful and compatible productivity suite of choice for Mac customers.

The Mac BU is also releasing Service Pack 1 (SP1) that provides increased stability, security and performance enhancements to the suite.

With the launch of SP1, the Mac BU is addressing the top issues as reported by customers. Office 2008 for Mac SP1 features key suitewide updates for increased stability, increased security and overall performance improvements.

Some applications als comes with specific updates, including improved compatibility with files exchanged between Excel 2008 for Mac and Excel 2003 and Excel 2007 for Windows.

Microsoft Entourage users will also notice an overall improvement to synchronization support, including removing attachments from Exchange Server messages and synchronizing to the server, as well as support for editing the contents of Exchange Server messages via AppleScript and synchronizing the changes to the server. Also added to this software is the ability to send and view images in Entourage from third-party tools.

Customers can download the update for free , and it will be also available from Microsoft Auto Update.

The group also is providing a glimpse at the road map of Office for Mac by announcing the return of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) in the next version. The groups says that although they have increased support in Office 2008 with alternate scripting tools such as Automator and AppleScript  and also worked with MacTech Magazine to create a reference guide  the team recognizes that VBA-language support is important to a select group of customers who rely on sharing macros across platforms.